verging_on_random

Speaking passively

March 20, 2007 on 9:06 pm | In Uncategorized |

I sometimes think that the passive voice should be eliminated from the English language. It makes solving the world’s problems too easy. All you have to say is that such-and-such should happen, closely followed by so-and-so, and everything will be apples. Readers/listeners will usually nod in agreement, overlooking your convenient failure to mention who should do such-and-such and how and when they are supposed to do so-and-so.

Governments understand how to use active or passive voices to suit their political ends. I’m sure you’ve noticed that governments always create jobs - actively. Yet unemployment passively rises; it just happens, no government ever ‘destroyed 20,000 jobs last month’.

There’s a wonderful example of how to use the passive voice in today’s Sydney Morning Herald. The writer, Stephen Morris, is an academic, and unfortunately academics have a habit of using the passive voice when it comes to public policy. They seem to regard it as sufficient to propose a course of action that will resolve a question - the practical problems of implementation are beneath their dignity to discuss.

Morris begins by conceding that he was comprehensively wrong to support the invasion of Iraq. An increasing number of pundits are doing this as a way of avoiding having to defend the indefensible. It’s the intellectual equivalent of the ruse old fiction writers used to use: “With one bound James was free!” In the case of Iraq, the formula is (1) admit that the invasion was a mistake, (2) argue that unfortunately the damage is done so it’s time to (3) put the past behind us and develop a program to fix the place up again.

I can’t help wondering why I should take any notice of somebody who’s just admitted they made the most god-awful cock-up in supporting the original invasion. With a track record like that, why would anybody trust them to get anything else right? But these people never seem to think like that. Once a wise pundit always a wise pundit seems to be their attitude, even if your past punditry makes you look like a complete ass.

Anyway having done his mea culpa, Morris goes on without embarrassment to explain that we have no real choice now but to stay in Iraq and fix up the mess we’ve made. And surprise surprise, the way to do that is to support Teh Surge, the brilliant new strategy that President George ‘Decider’ Bush adopted in which he’s sending another 17,500 23,000 30,000 troops to Baghdad.

Now you’re probably familiar with the strategic genius of Teh Surge so I’ll only summarise it briefly, or rather let Morris do it. Here’s the crap old strategy:

The previous strategy involved US forces suppressing insurgents in their urban neighbourhoods, then retreating to fortified bases while leaving community protection to the inept Iraqi army.

Can you see the flaw in that? Me too … in fact I reckon an averagely intelligent 12 year old could. The description of the Iraqi army as ‘inept’ is a dead giveaway. Once the US forces retreated to their bases, the damned insurgents would come right back again.

How to solve this intractable difficulty? Fortunately the President turned to ‘the most gifted general in the US Army, David Petraeus’. No I don’t know why he wasn’t in charge from the start - something to do with liberals in the Pentagon I expect. Anyway here’s the new strategy, a work of staggering genius that only a gifted general or that averagely intelligent 12 year old could have come up with:

The Petraeus strategy involves committing more US troops (the so-called “surge”) to seize insurgent occupied areas, eliminating fighters found there, and then holding the area by establishing US-Iraqi military outposts in the community.

If you analyse the difference between this revolutionary new strategy and the old, discredited strategy, you’ll see that it lies in having US troops stay in the community to keep an eye on provide comradely support to the inept Iraqi army. So far so good.

I can see the merits of this strategy but I confess I’ve always had a niggling doubt in the back of my mind. Like if this is a ’surge’, won’t the extra US troops have to go home soon? And when they do, won’t the Iraqi army go back to being inept, thus leaving the insurgents to return and put the place pretty much back where it was before the whole exercise began?

Fortunately Morris has answered my unspoken reservations, cleverly using the passive voice to do so. According to him:

Then economic reconstruction and community development can be undertaken. Training of Iraqi soldiers would continue. At some point the process of disarming the Shiite militias, if necessary by force, would begin.

Isn’t that great? So many admirable outcomes achieved at the stroke of a pen without having to grapple with tedious questions like who, or when, or how. I mean try to rephrase it in the active voice and see how you get on:

Then XXX can begin to reconstruct the economy while YYY develops a sense of community. ZZZ will continue to train Iraqi soldiers. AAA will begin to disarm the Shiite militias in ?, 200?, if necessary by force.

Fill in the real names and dates. Go on, try it and see how you get on. Remember when you get to the community development bit that the US is cordially loathed by virtually all Iraqis, and that hardly any Americans speak Arabic when you fix up the training issue. Oh and all the combat troops are committed already, so you’ll have to be creative when you suggest who’s going to disarm the Shiite militias. They’re the ones who haven’t started to kill occupying troops yet. There’s a lot more of them than there are Sunni insurgents, who are the ones who’ve caused most of the trouble so far. I’m sure you’ll figure something out.

I think Stephen Morris has used the simplest of linguistic devices to make the future problems in Iraq pfffttt!! Blow away in the passively voiced breeze. Hopefully he and others like him won’t get away with it any longer - the self-appointed Middle Eastern experts who blandly admit that they screwed things up in 2003, thereby causing untold death and suffering, but now have the unmitigated gall to offer their pious platitudes about what should be done to fix up their mess.

Take all the useless murdering arseholes to Baghdad, give them a rifle and an Arabic phrase book and tell them to go start implementing their strategy. Vague ‘this should be done’ bullshit doesn’t cut it any more - someone has to start getting active and since they caused the disaster, it might as well be them.